


Three Eventful Years in Harry Potter's Life

by drarryangels



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Child Abuse, Comfort, Falling In Love, Fluff, Gen, Growth, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Healing, Hurt, Hurt/Comfort, Love, M/M, PTSD, Touch, Trauma, Tumblr Prompt, touch starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:02:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22326037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drarryangels/pseuds/drarryangels
Summary: Harry Potter has never been touched with bare skin in his life. Sure, there have been belts and pans, but never someone's hand in his. It's just the way life is. But eventually, someday, there's someone there. Someone he didn't expect to come back into his life. Someone he didn't expect to hold his hand and hug him close without expecting anything in return. But when that person comes, everything changes.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 9
Kudos: 527





	Three Eventful Years in Harry Potter's Life

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry my summary skills are detestable. Hope you like!

**1990**

“Boy!” Uncle Vernon shouted, pointing viciously at Harry. Every step took him closer and closer to Harry, sweatily clambering into his space. “Get in the cupboard now!”

Harry wrapped his arms around himself and slowly edged towards the cupboard. He was only a couple steps from the entrance of the cupboard now. His cupboard. Oh, how he wished it wasn’t his. How he wished it was a cupboard like any other. 

Uncle Vernon came closer. A step before the sill of the cupboard door, Harry stopped and wheeled around to Uncle Vernon’s purple face. “I don’t want to go,” Harry whimpered, doing his best to prevent his face from crinkling up into a sob. 

Every bone in his body was screaming at him to close his mouth, shut it all down. No tears, no little gasps of air. His body betrayed him. 

“What did you say, boy?” Uncle Vernon leered down at Harry, leaning closer and closer. 

“Nothing,” Harry murmured. He backed even further towards the cupboard. Harry chanced a glance backwards. Darkness crept out of the edges of the tiny cupboard, sneaking out of the spiderwebs and into Harry’s belly. He shook his head back and forth a little. One breath and he’d be inside.

No matter what Uncle Vernon did, no matter how many meals he had to miss, no matter how many chores he had to do. No matter what it cost, Harry didn’t think he could go a centimeter closer to the beckoning cupboard door. The tiny grail on the door gleamed cruelly at him, waiting for the door to slam behind him. 

“Get in,” Uncle Vernon said. Mockery fell out of his voice and the sharp knife of brutality edged its way into his tone. It wouldn’t be long before Aunt Petunia would come pecking out of the kitchen, wielding a hot frying pan. 

See, the thing about the Dursleys was that they never touched Harry. Harry couldn’t think of a single time in his life when he had been willingly touched by another human, except for when an odd man had come up to shake his hand in a store nearly a year ago. 

Even when the Dursleys forced him to do something, they refused to touch him. The only contact Harry ever received was when someone’s shoulder brushed against his on the rare occasion that he was taken out in public. 

Despite the fact that the Dursleys never allowed their bare skin anywhere near his, they did happen to be very creative in punishing him in other ways. Belts and frying pans were favorites. 

Uncle Vernon’s voice came through him in waves and wobbled throughout his skull before he could understand what was happening. By the time it reached his understanding that Uncle Vernon would make him sorry if he didn’t go in his cupboard when asked, the end of a well oiled belt was already whipping down through the air. 

The sharp crack of the end of the leather belt resounded through the entry way. Pain slapped across Harry’s shoulder, and he reached up automatically to protect himself. A light whip drifted through the air in shimmering horror. The belt fell perfectly on his wrist, which would be easily covered up by a long sleeved t-shirt and passed off as a nasty fall if seen. The Dursleys were nothing if not excellent at maintaining a reputation.

Harry distantly felt himself crumple over, falling back into his cupboard. The dark corners swallowed him whole as he tumbled onto the pillow crammed in the back. Most days it served as his matress, but occasionally, the ratty feathers made for his blanket. Uncle Vernon slammed the door before his skimpy frame was tucked all the way in,and his foot got caught in the doorway. Uncle Vernon took a long look at a bony toe wiggled into a hole in one of Dudley’s ratty socks before slamming the crooked door over Harry’s ankle repeatedly. 

Harry didn’t make a peep. The door slammed over and over again and the noise cracked through the house like a quiet flame lighting under a cold rock. Spikes drove up Harry’s leg, but he managed to pull in his foot by the pant leg and stared wide eyed up at Uncle Vernon until he slammed the door for good. 

The shiny metal grill grinned at him through stripes of shuttered light. Then Uncle Vernon slid the grill closed and Harry was alone. 

That cupboard door didn’t open for another week after that. 

**1999**

Firelight flickered over Harry’s face and warmed him up through the tip of his nose. A weight dipped the couch next to him, but he didn’t turn to look who it was. If he bothered to think about it, he knew who it was. No one other than Ron and Hermione spoke to him these days, and even they didn’t come by often. After the war had ended, all of Harry’s friends got busy with the continuation of their lives and Harry fell behind with every step of a life he hadn’t expected. Only one person ever came around these days.

“Potter,” Draco said softly. No matter how many times Harry had asked him to call him Harry instead of Potter, Draco still insisted on it. “Potter,” Draco said again.

“What is it?” Harry asked quietly, still not looking up. 

Grimmauld Place stood sturdy and strong, warmer and brighter since Harry had moved in and renovated after the war. It served as both a dreadful reminder and a longing glimpse at everything the war had taken and given, but Harry couldn’t imagine ever letting go of it. Surprisingly, it had become home. 

“Am I allowed to ask what happened today?” Draco said, scooting closer on the couch and bringing his knees up to his chin. 

Harry shrugged and sunk deeper into the couch cushions. Draco could ask.

He could ask all he wanted about the little guest bedroom at the top of the stairs. He could ask about how small it was, or how Harry had ended up locked in there for the better part of a day thanks to the upended magic of Blacks. He could ask about when Draco had come around for tea, as he always did, why he had found Harry in a sobbing, shaking mess clutching onto the handle of the locked door. Why when Draco opened the door, Harry couldn’t move at first because he was expecting a blow to come hailing from above, his reward for being liberated. 

Although Draco could ask, that didn’t mean Harry had to answer any of the questions. 

But then, Draco had pried Harry’s hands off the rusted door handle and touched Harry’s back gently and Harry had hurtled forward, catching Draco into a crushing hug. And instead of doing everything Harry expected him to do, he’d simply tugged Harry a little closer and held on. 

So when Draco said, “It’s okay if the answer is no.”

Harry said, “No. I mean yes. I- I’m sorry. I’ll explain.” Draco watched him patiently and Harry took a deep breath. “My aunt and uncle… they didn’t treat me like a person really.”

Draco lay his hand over the hand Harry was worrying into the threads of the pillow on the couch. “We don’t have to talk about this-”

“I do,” Harry interrupted. He finally looked up at Draco, whose eyes were open and sweet, and who was sitting, ready to listen like no one ever was. “If you don’t mind listening, I’d like to talk about it.”

“Okay,” a soft smile slipped over Draco’s cheeks and he intertwined his fingers with Harry’s, effectively stopping him from rubbing holes into the couch. 

Harry toyed with the pillow in between them for a moment before pushing it off the couch. He watched Draco watch him as he moved closer to him and closed the gap in between their knees on the couch. “I never think about it like this, but I suppose my aunt and uncle abused me.” Harry tried to ignore Draco’s sharp intake of breath. “They never touched me. Not with their skin at least. But they were pretty generous with getting me to do what they wanted with a belt or kitchen ware.”

Draco was shaking his head, his mouth open in a little ‘o’. Something in Harry’s chest squeezed tightly. Lungs, heart, ribs. He shook his shoulders a little and rotated his body to face Draco’s.

“It’s… difficult to talk about. Or even think about really.” Harry inhaled heavily. “When I was two, they put me in a cupboard. The one under the stairs.” Harry’s words came out jolted and uneven. He tried to control the ragged timing of his air coming out in abrasive gasps. The sound echoed endlessly in his ears. “I lived there until I was almost eleven.”

“Potter,” Draco interrupted. The two were now sitting opposite each other, their knees touching. Harry stared at the ground while Draco tried to pick up Harry’s face with his eyes. “You really don’t have to tell me any of this.” Draco paused. “I know things are different between us now. But I’m not- I’m not Ronald or Hermione.”

Harry finally squeezed Draco’s hand in return. This part was new. The touching and hand holding. It only ever happened when they were alone, in private, but it still existed in the most wonderful, stomach-swooping of ways. 

“I know,” Harry said slowly, “but it’s easier to say this to you.”

“Why me?”

“Because in some ways… you understand it?” Harry looked at Draco carefully. Maybe Harry was reading this all wrong, and Draco had no idea how important it was that he tell _Draco_ this and not Ron and Hermione. Harry tried to shrug it off casually. 

Draco lightly brushed his fingers over Harry’s shoulder before dropping his hand back into his own lap. “I think I get it. The things I went through when I was younger with my father, and the things from the Manor when the Dark- when He was there, are different. But I suppose, they’re the same in some ways.”

Harry nodded, mostly to reassure himself. And it was with that he found himself telling Draco everything that had transpired from the moment he could remember recognizing that the Dursleys were not his own family. He told Draco all about the cupboard, the chores, the bullying. They never touched him with their bare skin. How he’d had a panic attack when Hermione hugged him for the first time. How he never let anyone touch him until fifth year, when Cho had kissed him. He cried then because the feeling of bare skin touching a part of him that was so new was so inherently wrong, even though it felt so good. He spoke until his mouth was dry about the hitting, and the ignoring, and the slapping away all traces of magic. 

It was horrible, every bit of it. When he finished, his face was wet with tears and his tongue was paper from every bit of his life that he hadn’t let himself touch. But by the end, Draco was looking at him with a face that didn’t look any different than it had when he had started. Sadder, maybe. But there was no pity or revenge. 

“Do you know,” Harry laughed wetly, trying to pull every torn memory from the past several hours into one sentence. “The thing I was most afraid of was being seen.”

“I know,” Draco whispered, his cheeks glimmering with unnoticed tears. “I know.”

Maybe it was the look in Draco’s eyes, or the way he was leaning just slightly forward into Harry’s words. Perhaps it was because Draco Malfoy had become a beautiful soul. For the first time in his life, Harry reached out to touch someone before they touched him. It was a move of trust, and of giving a piece of himself to someone he was expecting to protect it forever. He linked his fingers between Draco’s and pulled him in to kiss him on the cheek. 

The second passed in the gust of an exhale and Harry leaned back again. Draco smiled through his tears and cautiously swiped his thumb under Harry’s eyes. 

“I’m sorry,” Draco said. “For what they did to you, and for being so cruel when we met. And thank you for telling me.” 

Relief plunged through Harry’s veins. Someday, he thought, he would tell Draco the other things. Dumbledore and his missions and crazy plans. The give and take of both having and not having Sirius in his life. His parents. Dying and then coming back to life. 

Someday. For now, he just let Draco hold onto his hand and talk to him quietly about things that wouldn’t matter in the morning. 

**2009**

“Mmph,” Draco groaned, turning his face into the pillow. Harry smiled and propped himself up on his elbow to watch the smooth swells and curves of Draco’s back. He scooted closer to Draco and bent his head down briefly to inhale into the joint of Draco’s shoulder and neck.

“Draco,” Harry whispered. He lifted a hand carefully to the back of Draco’s neck and trailed his fingertips down his spine, letting his hand bump over the soft ridges of his back. “Wake up.”

“Why?” Draco grumbled into the pillow. Harry brushed his lips lightly against the fine hairs at the soft nape of Draco’s neck. It was the kind of light kiss that was barely meant to be felt, only given. “Who s’this?” Draco muttered.

“It’s Harry,” he grinned and tried not to snicker. 

“Potter?” Draco sat up suddenly, his hair sticking up in every direction and a muddled expression smeared across his face from sleep. “I know him!”

Harry laughed and reached up to pat Draco’s hair down. “Love, you married him.”

Draco whirled to see Harry laying back in the white nest of the comforter and blankets. “Oh,” Draco flopped back and closed his eyes tightly against the thin golden light. “S’too early.”

Harry slung his body over Draco’s and threw a leg around his hips. Draco shifted under him and made a gruff noise that Harry ignored, instead opting to cuddle himself closer. “Not happy to hear you married me?”

Draco grunted and sleepily looped his hands around Harry’s waist. “A loser like you?” He shrugged lopsidedly, pressed up into the pillows. “I would never.”

Harry melted the rest of his body weight over Draco to squish him. “Git. I love you.”

Pale eyelashes lifted up and a hint of gray peeked out from Draco’s face. “I love you too.”


End file.
